


Give Yourself Away

by jumpsoap



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Sappy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-09-16 02:32:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16945308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jumpsoap/pseuds/jumpsoap
Summary: Ignis didn't know how to tell him that he fell in love with him that day. Maybe it wasn't something that needed to be said.





	Give Yourself Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionheart (cruel_oath)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruel_oath/gifts).



> [This song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCnf46boC3I) is dear to me and I'd like to share my feelings. Is this a songfic? It's kind of a song fic.
> 
> I hope you like it, Charlie! Happy holidays!

Ignis recognized his voice. They hadn’t exchanged more than the briefest of pleasantries, but he’d heard the boy crowing through the door of Noctis’s apartment, shouting from deep inside cacophanus arcades.

He recognized his voice, although he’d never heard it like this. Never seen him like this, either, curled over a guitar on a park bench, one leg crossed over the other. The instrument’s case was open at his feet, the single crumpled bill inside rustling in the breeze. 

Prompto was singing a song Ignis had never heard before, a simple, warbling melody, his fingers picking out a rhythmic accompaniment. His voice was strong, and if he tripped over some of the changes in pitch, Ignis found he didn’t mind. 

Standing at the entrance to the park, listening to Prompto just a few yards away, Ignis heard the lyrics and felt an unexpected pang of melancholy. The roughness of the performance somehow made it sharper. He was very aware of the wilting leaves drifting through the air and the wind pushing at his back and lifting the edges of his coat.

Ignis wasn’t the only one appreciating the show. A tiny girl was standing nearby, staring. When Prompto finished his song with a slow, resonant strum, she waddled up to him and dropped a fistful of grass into his case.

“Hi there,” he said to her, and his smiled seemed, to Ignis, to carry some lingering sadness. Prompto leaned over his guitar to look down at the bits of green. “Thanks! Do you like music?” 

“Ah,” she vocalized. Her caretaker rushed over and gathered her up, apologizing to Prompto and adding a tinkling of change to his case. 

He waved as they left, and then, to Ignis’s surprise, their eyes met. He’d forgotten himself, standing there and watching. 

Prompto seemed surprised, too. He fumbled the neck of the guitar, and it called out a twang.

He’d recovered by the time Ignis walked over to him, and hopped to his feet, teeth bared in a stiff grin. 

“Hey, Ignis! What’s, uh, what’s up? You weren’t looking for me, right?”

“No,” Ignis said. “I’m simply on a walk. I didn’t expect to see you here.” 

Prompto was still standing awkwardly, feet bumping against his guitar case. Ignis felt as guilty as though he’d barged into Prompto’s bedroom unannounced. He sat down on the bench, and Prompto copied him. 

“Are you here often?” Ignis asked. 

Prompto shrugged, scraping a fingernail along one of the thicker guitar strings. “Here and there.” 

Ignis took off his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth from his pocket, Prompto’s shape going fuzzy for a moment before he replaced them. “Did you write that song you were singing?”

Prompto laughed, a trace of music to the sound. “No way, dude! I don’t really write songs.” 

“You do seem a bit young to be singing about things like that.” 

“Oh.” Prompto’s smile faltered for just a moment, but then he elbowed Ignis playfully. “It’s just a song.” 

Ignis laced his fingers together while Prompto ducked away and knelt down to lay his guitar into its case. “What I meant is, I wouldn’t have thought you’d be interested in something quite so gloomy.”

Prompto shrugged, shoulder blades showing through his thin sweater. “I like how it sounds.” 

“It was very nice,” Ignis tried again to extract his foot from his mouth.

“Thanks,” Prompto said, slinging the case over his shoulder as he stood and turned. The coins inside rattled to the bottom. 

Ignis got to his feet as well. “I hope I can hear you sing again.”

Prompto dipped his head, rubbing the back of his reddening neck, but not before Ignis caught the hint of a genuine smile. “Sure, if you want,” Prompto mumbled before leaving Ignis to wander the park on his own, aimless now despite never having had a reason to come there in the first place. “Maybe I can play something more upbeat for you, next time.”

* * * * *

Ignis still saw him like that in his mind’s eye, the sun shining on him through wind-waving trees, face bent down over the guitar in his lap. He imagined that different sunlight was now slipping through the window at the corner of their modest apartment, framing Prompto where he sat strumming an instrument he’d salvaged from some abandoned store across town, among teams of people working day and night to raise a city up from the ruins. 

“We’re getting a bit of a sunset tonight,” Prompto said, at a pause in his idle practicing. “Because of the clouds. It’s pretty.”

Ignis turned the flame down on the stove to let their dinner simmer and then washed his hands. He paused, replacing a dishtowel where it hung off the counter, a memory picking at the edge of his mind. “Do you remember,” he started slowly, feeling a little foolish, a little sentimental, “The song you played at the park, that one day?” 

“Gonna have to be a little more specific there, dude.” 

“The one about the clouds and the circus crowds.” 

“Huh…” A few bars of notes, testing. “Yeah, I remember.” 

Ignis leaned against the counter, braced on his elbows. He closed his eyes as Prompto began to play in earnest, his impression of the light that filled the room dropping to warm darkness. 

The song that had been etched into Ignis’s soul that day came to life again inside the home they shared. Prompto’s voice was stronger, now, more mellow and confident, but unchanged in some essential way.

In spite of all they had experienced together and apart, all those years of fighting and grieving and singing, he sang with the very same pathos of a boy at the edge of manhood looking to a future of turmoil. Or perhaps, even back then, he already had the spirit of a man who had seen two sides of his own life and understood that there were entire universes beyond it that he would never comprehend.

It had taken Ignis a decade of darkness to learn the contours of his own insignificance. It had taken longer for him to learn that there was nothing wrong with that. To be one person, only able to experience what he could in the time he had. That was everything. 

As the song ended and Prompto _hrm_ ed, picking at the tuning again, Ignis filled a cup with water from their pitcher and brought it over there. 

“Thanks,” he said, taking a gulp and setting it down on the wooden sill. “I didn’t think you liked that song.”

Ignis found Prompto’s chin with a finger and pressed a kiss to his smiling lips. “I love it. I always did.”


End file.
